Xanaxland
One of four scenarios attempting to answer the question: How can projects combining creativity and technology become transformative experiences for our users?
Axes: Incremental impact, no technological innovation.
Welcome to the supersized Xanaxland, a flat world where pop culture has eradicated all competition. Bookshops stock only self-help books, celebrity magazines, and fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible. There are more TV channels than family units. Subscription to edutainment channels is obligatory, but there is no requirement that education should be followed. Wall-sized TVs are where all of Xanaxland's personalised education happens. The TV is equipped with sensing technologies allowing the monitoring of viewers' life signs and habitual behaviours. Customised edutainment is designed to help viewers improve their lifestyles if they so wish. If not, the edutainment can be discarded with a flick of their fingers, transporting the viewers back to their preferred channels, including SONS (Soap Opera Non-Stop), Christ Around the Clock, More Real Than Reality, All You Can Watch Football, and many others. Electronic Arts has a monopoly on the gaming industry, producing a stream of games that all follow a familiar pattern. Their gamers do not want to be surprised or challenged - they want instant gratification and they want it now. A similar need for gratification is the diet in Xanaxland: fast food, soft drinks with a guaranteed sugar high, nutrients in pill-form and the ubiquitous anti-depressants. Obesity has been declared a pandemic and liposuction is the most frequently performed surgery. A large portion of the widespread porn industry has latched onto the new fat fetish, sponsored by multinational fast food chains. Some of the more health conscious consumers burn their fat in city-sized fitness-clubs-cum-human-engineering clinics. Universities have long ago retreated from real life and become bastions of theory uprooted from practice and reality. They are protected by faceless bureaucracies who survive by taxing the inhabitants of Xanaxland without their knowledge and threatening them with austerity measures whenever someone dares to question their motives. It has been established that climate change is a figment of environmentalists' imagination and can be safely ignored. There are more cars, roads and shopping malls being built than ever before. The bureaucracy-approved development and construction of office buildings and slimming resorts continues unchecked, and it is predicted that in Xanaxland, Paved Earth is soon to become reality.
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